Wonder why they're not just giving us access, if it's indeed so good? Seems it's just to generate some noise and hype around Gemini. Hardly believable after the previous faked demo, as someone already said.
Google faces a different calculus than Microsoft/OpenAI when throwing these things out. It's just like Google Cloud. They have huge, valuable first-party workloads that compete for the hardware resources that would be used by generally-available free AI toys.
For Microsoft it doesn't make a difference. They are taking their own cash, investing it in OpenAI, and then turning right around and booking it as revenue. As a bonus it makes Google look wrong-footed. But fundamentally Microsoft doesn't care how much money they torch doing this.
